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Janet Francoeur is a painter, a tile maker, a wanna be writer, an ok photographer, a gardener, she has wanderlust and not enough time to do everything she wants to do! Jan, as she likes to be called, has been a professional artist her entire adult life. She started with drawing in pencil, then ink, then watercolor, clay and now oil and mosaic. For 25 years she did house portraits in ink and for the past 15 years she also does them in watercolor. Jan and her husband Michael moved to New Bern, North Carolina in 1989 from Aspen, Colorado, where they had lived for 6 years. They were both born and raised in southern Michigan not far from Ann Arbor.

Exhausted from Hurricane Florence I guiltily decided to go on the trip I had signed up for last fall. I’m glad I did. We set off on a two day train trip from Dublin with Railtours Ireland. We traveled south west through the countryside of Co. Kildare. We visited the Cliffs of Moher, among the […]

This is not how I wanted the corner I live on to make the front page of the New York Times. My house is just to the right of these folks. This is for my folks and friends that don’t live near. We are always reluctant to evacuate because it can be hard to return. […]

I’ve never been told to evacuate before. It was odd (after trying to move stuff out of the way of flooding) that as I looked around as to what I needed to take with me, I thought, it’s all just stuff. An interesting feeling. I didn’t want to leave but didn’t know what else to […]

I returned from Michigan with a few days to spare before going to see my friend Deb in Colorado. We made our base in Breckenridge. I can tell I’m getting old! There is a huge difference in 8000 and 10,500 feet. We lived in Aspen for 6 years at 8000 feet and after a couple […]

I’m trying to catch up on my writing about trips earlier this year. After my clay workshop in Doylestown I drove to Michigan to join my sisters at the church we grew up in for their 150th anniversary. I was glad I made the effort to get there. I saw lots of art, birds, family, […]

The clay workshop with Lisa Naples was very inspiring. I choose a rabbit as my piece for the week. I also learned as much from watching others as I did from working on my own piece. I hadn’t realized how tall and big it was reasonable to build with coils, I always tried, and struggled, […]

On my way to my clay workshop with Lisa Naples I took at a couple extra days to do some sightseeing. I had been to the Brandywine River Museum, YEARS ago. So long ago that you could still see all the front of the mill building. Now it’s so grown up you can just see […]

Road Trip – The Cotswolds part 2 plus Chelsea Flower Show – click the link to see LOTS more photos. The fabulous trip continued…. we stopped at Bourton-on-the-Water to take a quick stroll through town, then went on to Bibury. One of Bibury’s main tourist spots and overlooking a water meadow and the river […]

What a treat to join 7 others on a tour of some of the gardens and private homes of the Cotswolds. They have a charity program called the National Garden Scheme where gardens all over the country are open, with all income donated to charity. Generally these are private gardens and this is the only […]